As if councils didn’t have enough to deal with!

“Councils are being warned to prepare for three months of disruption in a no deal Brexit , a leaked briefing has revealed.

Town hall chiefs have been told to plan for “reasonable worst case scenarios” including runs on food, petrol and the banks.

They should prepare to report to central government every eight hours – and could have to cancel leave over Easter, it says.

The shock briefing, circulated to council chiefs and leaked to the Municipal Journal, is made up of minutes from a recent Local Resilience Forum meeting.

Dozens of LRFs, which bring together councils, emergency services and the NHS, are aiding Whitehall’s No Deal plan Operation Yellowhammer – which is led by the same officials who would deal with a flu pandemic.

He added: “It’s frankly shocking that the local government sector has been starved of resilience support that they now so desperately need.”

A spokesman for the Local Government Association, which represents councils, added: “We are working with Government and engaging with the expertise of local government to ensure we get these crucial negotiations right for local communities.”

A government spokeswoman said: “We remain confident that we will secure an agreement with the EU that works for the whole of the UK.

“Rightly, we are working with Local Resilience Forums across the country to ensure they are fully prepared.

“While it is the duty of responsible planners to consider the worst case scenarios, this is not a prediction of what is going to happen.”

One thought on “As if councils didn’t have enough to deal with!”

Well it certainly sounds like a prediction – and of course whilst it might not be as bad as this, equally perhaps they have already toned it down and could be worse or far worse than this.

Personally I think that the result of food shortages and petrol rationing – and of consequent sharp rises in the cost of these – will be rioting, use of the army to stop looting, curfews and possibly even martial law. And I am prepared to bet that all of these were discussed with army and police chiefs several months ago, and they they have been making detailed contingency plans in the event of civil unrest ever since.

During the referendum the Brexiters assured us that we would retain access to the single market, stay in THE Customs Union and that negotiations to leave and for future trade deals would be easy peasy. I don’t recall anyone saying that there was even the remotest chance that Brexit would result in disruption of any sort (much less for three months), nor a breakdown in food supplies, shortage of petrol or the banks running out of money nor that there might be riots or looting.

So how did it ever come to this?

(Aside, that is, from the Tories pandering to a minority to have a referendum, then allowing the Leave Campaign to illegally overspend their campaign limits on blatant lies, disinformation and social networking manipulation, and then the same Tories who promised a soft brexit switched to demanding an ultra-hard or no-deal Brexit and sabotaging the negotiations in order to get it. That is how it came to this!!)